Wednesday, November 28, 2007

As we approach the end of the year will we be inundated with end of the year awards, and of course not so recently we had the Nobel Prizes. Named after Alfred Nobel the inventor of TNT (Boom!). Well here at the 147th Carnival of Education we are going to have our own prizes. The Noble Prizes, these prizes will celebrate that noble avocation to which we have all taken the time to consider: Education. Education is defined by Miriam-Webster to be:

So to all of you that have made Education your passion even for only this week, Thank You, here is a prize.

The first Noble Prize goes to one of my favorite teachers growing up, Brinda Price. She was my ninth grade English teacher. As I remember her she was about 4 feet 10 inches, and she was tough as nails. You had better get your Romeo and Juliet packet in on time or else she wasn't going to take it. On the other hand, she loved us. She loved us with a mother's love. She wanted us to grow, and live, and enjoy life. She had a passion for her subject that was only exceeded by her passion for her students. She is one of my heroes, in the sense that I want to make my students feel the way I did in her class. I want my students to see me as a force of nature that cares about them and about math and mostly about their education. I desperately, forcefully, passionately want them to develop mentally, morally, or aesthetically especially by my instruction.

So the first Noble Prize goes to Brinda Price of Columbus Alternative High School circa 1984. Thank you, and I am sure that the lack of prize money will not surprise you given your choice of profession.

The Noble Prizes are given to recognize the sacrifice that we all make to our charges, you are all working to make the future better, to make each child's lives better.

This is a terribly old post, and we don't know one another--but I am also a student of Brinda Price's, and I am also still spinning under her rapture. I am finishing up my undergraduate work in English and Philosophy right now, but there isn't a week that goes by when I don't think of Mrs. Price, and the sort of motivation, importance and love she was able to conjure up in that classroom. I've never seen anything like it again. College has been a disappointment--or rather, maybe, the expulsion from Eden: now the burden is on me, all the hard work of hands, to figure out how to learn like that, to love excellence like that.